Among a Thousand Stars Read online

  Jo Bartlett

  Jo Bartlett has been a teacher for longer than she ever expected, which made it difficult to choose names for her children because ‘challenging’ students put her off so many potential choices. She now combines educational consultancy, teaching in HE and blogging as one of The Write Romantics, with writing both fiction and non-fiction, and lives so close to the South-East edge of England that she’s very nearly French.

  Website: www.jobartlettauthor.com

  Among a

  Thousand Stars

  They say you’d do anything for love, but what happens when you don’t believe it exists?

  Jo Bartlett

  It’s a So Vain Book

  Published in Great Britain in 2015 by:

  SO VAIN BOOKS Ltd

  75 London Road

  Oxford OX3 9BB

  www.sovainbooks.co.uk

  Email: [email protected]

  Copyright © 2015 Jo Bartlett

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  A catalogue record from this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-9930660-8-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Marco Dusi

  Printed and Bound in Great Britain by PrintOnDemand, Worldwide

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  For my dad – the ultimate raconteur.

  Ten years earlier

  Ashleigh flicked through her sketchbook; turning to the life drawing from the previous week, she barely stifled a snort.

  ‘You captured his essence-of-silver-back quality really well.’ Stevie grabbed the pad and let out a low whistle. ‘Did you have any pencil left?’

  ‘He was a tad on the hirsute side, wasn’t he?’ She grinned. Whoever was modelling for them this time couldn’t be as challenging to draw as the last burly nude; body hair was surprisingly hard to get right.

  ‘To be honest, I thought he was wearing Velcro! This week I’m hoping for lots of folds and wrinkly bits.’ Stevie winked, crossing his fingers. They’d met on the first day of college and even the history of art classes weren’t too bad with Stevie next to her. They’d only known each other for a couple of months, but she couldn’t imagine life without him.

  ‘Welcome class, welcome!’ Lissy Bainbridge, their life-drawing tutor, swept into the room with her usual flourish. Her long purple skirt was decorated with tiny mirrors and tassels on the hem that brushed across the floor as she walked. When she spoke she waved her arms around her, so that the thirty or so bangles she wore on each wrist banged and crashed against one another. ‘I have a treat for you this afternoon, the female form… in all its glory!’

  Lissy insisted that the life models were initially positioned behind screens, so that their outline could be seen first and the screens drawn back slowly, as though they were stars on stage on the opening night of a play. ‘Looks a bit too skinny to have the sort of folds and lumpy bits I was after.’ Stevie sounded disappointed. ‘Still, I suppose it means we can get out of here a bit quicker. Might even catch the start of Countdown.’

  She wasn’t sure if she could stomach spending two hours staring at another hairy trucker; this was more like it. Glancing down at her sketchbook, just as Lissy began to draw the screens back, Ashleigh breathed a sigh of relief. Looking up again, she could see the back view of a woman draped on her side along a chaise longue, with pale red freckles dotted across her shoulders. Her hair was red too – almost certainly with the help of a bottle, but red all the same – a sort of natural henna dye, that looked as though it had come straight from the earth.

  The first uncomfortable tug of familiarity took hold at the sight of the woman’s leg. Something about the shape of it, and the slightly weathered look of the hand that rested halfway down the thigh, made Ashleigh’s stomach flip.

  It couldn’t be. Gulping, she shook her head, as though that might help dislodge the unwanted thought that had settled there.

  ‘Now my darlings,’ Lissy clapped her hands together and smiled broadly, ‘when our model turns around, that’s the view I want you to capture. The female nude is, after all, an artist’s purest muse.’

  ‘Do you think she’s actually bonkers?’ Stevie muttered under his breath. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for this. I might need counselling to get over what we’re about to see.’

  Ashleigh wanted to scream, or run and hide and never come back. But she couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move. All she could do was to wait frozen as the woman turned over.

  ‘Jeez!’ Stevie appeared to lose the ability to whisper. ‘It’s an education if nothing else, but she hasn’t got a bad body for a woman of her age. What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ The heat of a blush crept across Ashleigh’s skin. The woman lying on the chaise longue was now waving at her; it was too late to even try to deny it. ‘I think, once again, I have proof that what I’ve known since I was thirteen is true – I officially have the most embarrassing mother in the world.’

  ‘That’s, that’s your…’ Even Stevie, who generally didn’t pause for breath, was at a loss.

  ‘Yes. That’s my mother.’ Slamming her sketchbook shut with considerable force, Ashleigh stood up. ‘So, sadly, I’ll be first in the queue for that counselling.’

  Chapter One

  ‘Do you think he looks suitably menacing for the Halloween issue, with a Chihuahua clutched to his bare chest and just those devil horns to give a hint of the theme we’re going for?’ Stevie raised an eyebrow and Ashleigh couldn’t help laughing. Ben Finnegan, the reality TV star and subject of their shoot, was as wrapped up in himself as ever; smoothing down his six pack with one hand and clutching the pint-sized pooch he took everywhere with the other.

  ‘What he looks like is your fantasy! Ashleigh lined up her camera to take the last few shots of the day, capturing Ben staring into Muffin’s eyes with the type of passion usually reserved for looking at himself in the mirror. She had to hand it to Stevie, the devoted teenage girls, who had made Ben’s reality series so successful, would be queuing up to buy their copy of Glitz when this issue hit the stands. ‘That’s a wrap then, Ben.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Don’t you know it’s autumn? I’m bloody freezing!’ Ben, whose alarmingly high-pitched voice suggested that steroids might have been at least partly responsible for bulking up his body, acted as though he’d spent a day down a coalmine. In truth he’d passed a few hours posing for photos in his flashy apartment and the last twenty minutes or so finishing off the shoot on his roof terrace. ‘Hold Muffin a minute, I need to get myself a robe and a shot of wheatgrass before I literally fall down!’ Ben clipped a glittery lead on to the Chihuahua’s diamante collar and thrust her into Stevie’s arms, before disappearing inside the flat.

  ‘Wheatgrass my arse!’ As Stevie spoke, Muffin curled her lip, protective of her owner despite her diminutive size. ‘Whatever it is he’s really taking has shrivelled his bits to the size of a cocktail sausage. I had to make him wear padded shorts in every shot.’ At the mention of the word sausage, Muffin started to growl.

  ‘Do you think she’s hungry?’ As she spoke, Ashleigh moved towards a trolley of
food that had been set up earlier by an assistant from Glitz. It was mainly the stuff that Ben supposedly lived on to build all that muscle. Strips of chicken were just the thing to appease a snappy Chihuahua. Grabbing a few pieces of the meat, she walked back to Stevie. The dog, clearly sensing she was about to be given a treat, shot out of his arms and towards her – like a bullet out of a gun.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ He let out a scream as the dog lurched forward and the end of her lead seemed to get caught up around his belt buckle.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? Muffin only eats organic meat and God knows what your assistant put in that!’ Ben had crossed the terrace in two strides. The sight of his precious dog squirming in Ashleigh’s arms, whilst still attached to Stevie by her glittery pink lead, made his voice more high-pitched than ever.

  Suddenly Stevie made a strange gasping sound. ‘I know you two are more worried about the dog than anything else but, just so you know, I appear to be bleeding. Quite a lot.’

  Looking down at his T-shirt, where a circle of lurid red was rapidly spreading across the white fabric, she felt her own blood rush to her head and down to her feet in a matter of seconds, before everything went black.

  ****

  ‘Have you forgiven me yet?’ Ashleigh handed Stevie a cup of something hot, which claimed to be coffee, encased in the type of polystyrene cup that only added to its synthetic taste.

  ‘Of course, honey.’ He took a sip of the offending liquid, pulled a face and handed it straight back. ‘I’ll be glad when they come and take this bloody thing out. How long did they say it would be? Do you think it’s more serious than they’re letting on?’ He shifted position on the hospital trolley and lifted the sheet back a fraction, so she had to look away.

  ‘You heard what the doctor said, it’s where the belly button ring has torn into your flesh and got embedded when the lead was yanked out. It needs an experienced nurse and she’s dealing with something else at the moment.’ She leant forward and spoke in a low voice. ‘I overheard him telling another doctor that it’s a patient with a toothbrush stuck somewhere that it shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Ooh, pull back the curtains a bit, honey, so we can see what’s going on out there.’ Stevie perked up quite considerably. ‘It’s like being in our own hospital drama.’

  They’d always loved people watching, it made working for Glitz magazine a natural choice, but it was one of the things that her ex-boyfriend had hated about her. Liam had said she was nosey. Only, as it turned out, she hadn’t been nearly nosey enough. She hadn’t checked his mobile phone for suspicious messages or his pockets for unexplained receipts, and they might still have been together if it hadn’t been for a slip of his texting thumb. When she’d received a text with a photo of part of his anatomy carefully sandwiched between the pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was as far as Liam’s reading had ever progressed, she’d been surprised to say the least. The accompanying message of ‘Darling Millie, can’t wait to slip between the covers with you again – it’s magic!’ had been even more of a surprise. Millie, as it later emerged, was Liam’s secret lover and a librarian of all things. Given the play on words, and pictures, the text had actually been quite well thought out. Except, of course, for the small detail of sending it to the wrong girl.

  ‘I thought this would all be a bit low rent for you. You know that coffee is as good as it gets, don’t you?’ Ashleigh raised an eyebrow. She loved Stevie, he’d been her best friend for over ten years, but he had what her father had always called “champagne tastes and lemonade pockets”. A freelance stylist, who barely knew where his next job was coming from, but with aspirations well above his means.

  ‘No, I’m enjoying roughing it honey.’ Stevie’s trademark grin was back. ‘You get a lot more drama on this floor of the hospital!’

  ‘Okay, your wish is my command.’ She pulled back the curtain of the cubicle so they could see into the corridor, where two plastic seats straddled a fixed table that was laden with dog-eared magazines and rack of leaflets about domestic abuse. Her life was all glamour, just as her old friends assumed.

  ‘Ooh, this looks like it could be interesting!’ Stevie spoke out of the side of his mouth, as a couple of world-weary looking women plonked themselves on to the plastic seats outside the cubicle.

  ‘God, I’m worn out.’ The younger of the two women sighed. ‘I can’t wait until your Terry picks us up, so I can get home, have a nice cup of tea and put my feet up with a magazine.’

  ‘Me too. Terry will kill me if he sees the price, but I treated myself to a copy of Glitz from the hospital shop. I figured I deserved it after an eight hour shift scrubbing the Sussex Ward.’ Her companion snorted with laughter. ‘You can laugh, but it’s three pounds fifty! Terry always moans that he can get two weeks worth of his newspaper for that price and there’s not even a nipple on display in Glitz!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, Sandra.’ The younger woman grabbed the magazine from her friend’s hand. ‘I’d say Zac Starr looks a right tit in that photo! For God’s sake who chose those clothes? He looks like a Rod Stewart tribute act!’

  ‘Did she just say what I think she did?’ Stevie’s injuries appeared to have been forgotten, as he sat bolt upright on the hospital trolley.

  ‘Sshh, she’ll hear you.’ Though her own heart was sinking into her boots, Ashleigh couldn’t help agreeing with Sandra’s friend. ‘And you must admit, Zac did look quite… colourful in that shoot.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Stevie stuck out his bottom lip like a sulky toddler. ‘But look at the state of her. Not even Gok could make that look good naked!’

  ‘I thought we weren’t mentioning Gok?’ Ashleigh smiled in spite of herself. Whenever one of his shows appeared on TV, Stevie would hurl a cushion at it and demand it was turned to a different channel. As far as he was concerned the TV stylist has stolen his dream job and that made it unbearable for him to watch.

  ‘That’s as maybe, honey, but he’s a genius and all I’m saying is that even he couldn’t play up her good points.’ Stevie bristled. ‘She needs a damn good bra for a start.’

  ‘I think the old man might be right about this mag being a waste of money!’ Sandra’s voice drifted across the corridor as she flicked through Glitz. ‘I mean the photos and the houses are glamorous all right, but the captions are so cheesy and who the hell cares where they chose their bleeding soft furnishings! Listen to this.’ She was pointing to one of the photos from the Zac Starr article. ‘Zac relaxes with fiancée Leanne on the luxury chaise longue, covered with fabric chosen on the glamorous couple’s recent holiday in Marrakech!’ The two women got up as a middle-aged man approached them and Sandra stuffed the magazine into her bag before following him back down the corridor; her contraband copy of Glitz safely hidden away.

  ‘Well, that was charming.’ All the excitement at eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation had drained out of Stevie and he slumped against the pillows. ‘Rod Stewart? Bloody cheek, they should see how hard I had to work to persuade Zac not to wear that jumpsuit he had made. Maybe I should ask them if there are any jobs going spare doing cleaning instead!’

  ‘Zac wanted to wear those clothes; it really isn’t a big reflection on your styling and even you must admit that some of the captions are pretty cringe worthy.’ She pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

  ‘It’s okay, honey, I’ll get over it. Anyway, it’s you who should be complaining, I had the styling forced on me by Zac’s appalling taste, but your photographs were bloody brilliant.’ He was at his best when he smiled. He had the kind of dimples that meant he could pass for a member of the upper sixth, even though the big three O was looming large. ‘Still it could be a lot worse. Just think, you could be working for Mark Harris.’

  They both grimaced. Mark was an old friend from art college and he ran one of those awful make-over studios in outer London, where disillusioned women were plumped a
nd preened to within an inch of their lives to create a soft focus portrait that only the vainest few would ever dare hang over the fireplace.

  He was right, of course, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she’d never be really happy working for Glitz. Sometimes she wondered how she’d ended up there. She knew there were other struggling photographers who’d sell their grandmothers to get a job like hers. She loved reportage, had always felt it told a much truer story; yet here she was photographing an ageing rock-star, draped across a chaise longue with fiancée number seven clinging on for dear life.

  ‘There’ll be no begging Mark for a job for you, honey, your career’s on the up!’ Stevie had called her honey ever since they’d met. There was real affection between them from that first day, a kind of instant chemistry. ‘Didn’t Zac say something to you about shooting his next album cover?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but his six previous fiancées have learnt to their cost what he’s full of.’ Ashleigh shrugged. Zac was every bit as fickle as his string of broken relationships suggested. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll even ring me.’

  ‘Well, he won’t do better.’ Stevie pulled her towards him again. ‘Sod Zac, we’ve got a big day tomorrow. Although I’ve got a feeling I won’t get to do much.’

  Angus, their jovial editor at Glitz, had sent them both an email outlining the expectations of Tom Rushworth, the focus of their latest assignment. He was a man who knew what he wanted and more importantly what he didn’t want, and that included a makeover.

  ‘Never mind, there’s always someone in desperate need of a restyle!’ Stevie grinned and it seemed he was in possession of a sixth sense. An elderly nurse, with a surprisingly bushy salt and pepper moustache, was striding determinedly towards him, wielding a large pair of tweezers like she meant business.